L'UNION Management

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L’UNION with Frederik Carlier about testing

“I’ve got three pieces of advice for you: Test, test and once again test!”

You will most certainly already have heard about this. Testing has taken on considerable importance in marketing and communication, particularly with the rise of digitalization. It allows you to improve your products, your e-mails, Facebook campaigns, landing pages, the UX of your website and many other things. To discover more about this topic we went to see Frederik of Quamotion, who, just like L’UNION, have their office in the ICAB. Their speciality? Testing the functionalities of mobile apps.

Who are you ?

My name is Frederik. I’m the co-founder of Quamotion and we do mobile test automation.

Why is it important to test ?

There are lots of mobile applications these days. For example when you pay for something, there is a chance that you use your mobile banking application. You probably want to make sure that when you make a transfer, the correct amount of money is transferred to the right person.

What is important to test ?

Lots of things are important to test. We focus on the functionality. We really need to make sure that the behaviour of the application is correct. With mobile applications there are a lot of different devices and we want to be confident that your application won’t fail on any of the different devices that your user might have.

What are you testing ?

We focus particularly on the functionality. We make sure that the application works correctly on all the different devices. It’s also possible to test other things, like UX for example but that’s not our focus.

When should the test be done ?

Ideally, you do continuous testing, so that every time a change is made to your application it can be verified. The sooner you test, and the sooner you get feedback to know if the application works correctly or not, the cheaper it is to fix. It is always advantageous to test as closely as possible to the development stage. But of course once you have released your application you can continue to test during production and can keep monitoring the application to make sure that it’s still working as intended.

Is the test phase not underestimated by many companies ?

Always! There are a couple of applications that have a short duration, so they aren’t used a lot. So those applications don’t need a lot of testing, or it’s not considered useful to test them regularly. However, the more important the application, such as mobile banking applications, the more important it is to make sure that they are tested correctly. We see that larger companies will focus on applications that are really important to the business. If the applications stop working the company loses money. For those types of application you see that companies start to take testing more seriously.

Why should you outsource the testing ?

When we started the company, we did a couple of interviews with large companies that had mobile applications. It was fun because they were like a large team with lots of different phones, with people who spend the entire day testing the applications manually. We thought we could do it better by automating it. So companies could test faster, get results faster and save money.

What are the most common bugs you find ?

We find a lot of bugs that appear when you keep using the application for a long time. Small bugs that you only find when you use the applications for a while. That’s typically a bug that we find with automation. Because testers they launch the application, kill the applications and they don’t find those kind of issues.